What does it look like when women take back their power in conscious ways?

We have rage pulsing in us. We have been overpowered. For damn sure. And we have repressed our own rage.

Dangerously, we may end up seeing our male partners as the perpetrator. And to some extent, if they are not consciously awakening to the fact that they have been the perpetrator, they still are and will be. But this is shifting. Give it room to shift.

We’ve watched generations of women depend on men while slandering them. Screaming “I don’t need a man!” meanwhile lonely. Speaking ill of the very men that fathered their children.

I’ve done all of the above in my life.

Sister, we need to stop these patterns. But we don’t surrender to remnants of the Patriarchy at the same time. No. We do take our power back, consciously.

We take it back while loving our men. While teaching our men. While holding high standards of our men and believing that they will reach it. (And men, you need to recognize your own role and meet her here rather than assuming that I am saying this is all her work to do. If you assume that, you’ll be left behind.)

We walk a line of tolerance and ferocity, woman. We own our rage and we love with a fierce and unapologetic heart. We admit what we don’t know and we simultaneously stand in our knowing. We learn our masculinity beside our femininity, appreciating that neither have been actualized in any of us, so there is no one to blame and there is now our own investigation to pursue.

We practice our power. We know ourselves as women. We find ways to cultivate our power from within, among sisters, and among our brothers too. We find ways to lovingly take our power back. We find ways to alchemize the old rage.

We play with power with our men. We play with what it looks like to explore penetration of power in both directions. We know what it is like to hold space and have it held for us. We do not manipulate or abandon, self or other. We love and we dance the dance of masculine and feminine, between and within us.

We work the rage out of our bodies in embodied practice, in dance, in safe vocal, somatic, and emotional release. We proactively create the safe spaces we need. We learn to unburden our body’s trauma patterns and we learn to take back the seat of our power - our physical, feminine selves. We move our bodies and we move our emotions that have been repressed for so long. We teach our men how to bare witness to this. Where to touch or not touch and where to hold the space or move aside.

We rage consciously, and we meet our own rage. We teach the world to meet women’s rage without creating further wounding. We investigate our own shadow, our own repression, so that we can unleash, heal, and transmute it.

There are also men who know how to hold this. In fact, we need to radically heal among our brothers in safe space so they can see and honor the feminine wounding. We all need this release. We heal as a collective, as these burdens have been all of ours. It does no good for us to rage against men now, because these men are our brothers, our sons, our lovers.

It does no good to teach our daughters, another generation, our passive rage. Reclaim yourself righteously, and all her to witness your strength. Teach her fierce love, for self and other.

We take back our power because power is Sovereignty. It’s what no one could actually ever take from you, so it is yours to reclaim, and you don’t need to fight anyone to get it. It is yours. It is right there, beside your hurt, your rage, your anger, woman. Look within. Consciously bring back what you yearn for.

By the time I was 33, my adrenals had crashed. The "why" of that is a long story, but long story short, I had been kicking my own ass, striving, and thinking that I wasn't enough for my entire life. Especially since the age of 19, when I birthed a daughter but wasn't ready, by society's standards, to raise her, and then I went to work ensuring that, by God, I would be enough and worthy of a child one day. Add to that - worthy of a child, money, husband, love, career, etc, etc, etc.

I didn't know my own worth then. And so I worked my ass off to try to attain and to prove it. My body was sending me warning flares but I didn't stop until I crashed.

This post is about the over-extension of ourselves as we're trying to prove something. So many are in this trap. No matter how far we've come, we can still find ourselves in this trap - the trap of not enough.

Trauma exacerbates this habit of perpetual action-taking in many cases. We experience something, and we run like hell from ever experiencing it again. Who feels me on this one? Get honest with yourself.

You take action upon action to stay afloat, to keep from feeling the shame of not succeeding, to finally "get to" where it is you imagine you must get to in order to feel you've made it.

You just keep taking action. It is wearing you the fuck out. You know it is not sustainable and your body is giving you clues, and yet, you power through. Why? It's time to get really honest with the "why."

I realized what I was doing, in part, when I crashed. I simply could not GO any longer. Coffee started to have a completely adverse affect, and instead of being a crutch, it became a hinderance (because my endocrine system could not handle the additional cortisol). I simply could not metabolize stress anymore. My body wasn't having it.

At that time, I also started to recognize that I had been completely out of touch with what is innately feminine inside of me. This action-orientation that I had been living in, the career ladders I had been climbing, the mindset of success - all of it aligned with more masculine characteristics than feminine ones. My feminine told me to pay attention to my intuition, to rest, to incubate, to follow my heart. I had NO IDEA what to do with this at first, and had to allow it to evolve in me.

It was not without difficulty. I was a school principal and I would close the door, sometimes multiple times a day, and lay on my back with my feet in the air like the ayurvedic doctor had encouraged me to do. My anxiety was through the roof. Crowds were making me panic. My body was freaking the fuck out, begging me for integration.

And then I spent a period of time heavily tilted toward inaction and rest. Part of me (bless that evolving part of me) thought that to regain my "feminine" meant to sway heavily to the side of inaction and spirituality. The pendulum had to swing for me until I could find my center. The balance of action & rest. We call in the guidance, and then we act on it. If we act without the guidance - well, we could crash.

Culturally, collectively, we have been in action-mode. We have been heavily in the masculine energy of forward motion. Rebalancing our lives involves a reintegration of the feminine into our consciousness - body, mind, soul.

We find her when we begin to honor cycles. Men, you need her as well. We find her when we listen to the voice that says "slow down." We honor her when we listen to her wisdom as she shares it.

Action steps in my life now are divinely directed. Rest and periods of integration are essential. This is no longer because my nervous system can't handle it (thankfully there has been much healing and bolstering of reserves) but because it is the ONLY way I know to trust my next steps.

Action & rest. Masculine & feminine. I love them both. I need them both. I AM them both.

I hope this serves you. If you are interested in creating more divinely-aligned action in your life, I am here to support you now. I support your own growth and goals through a mindful and soul-based approach to coaching. I work in a very personalized way. We target your goals, but we do it by incorporating rest so that you can access your own divine wisdom. This is intuitive, real, loving, and we don't fuck around. You can be beautifully fierce and action oriented AND nourished and restful. You can achieve balance, and nothing feels more "successful" or whole than that. Contact me for a conversation about any of the above.

I lived in the woods. In the dream, I did not see any house that I lived in, I just knew that I lived there, and I’d emerge from the woods, walking, with my dog by my side.

Over and over again in the dream, my dog and I came from the woods to visit a man; the man I loved. We would visit his home, remove our shoes in the pile by the door. I spent many warm and rapturous nights in his bed. His arms a tent around me, strong enough to allow me to move, to climb and quake.

His kitchen full. Providing. Meals were had together.

But then something happened, and a habit was formed, even amidst our intense love. He wasn’t fully aware of the consequence of the pattern he was allowing. A knock would come at the front door of his home. And every time, my love would slither out the front door, pulling it closed behind him, to stand in the front of the house and talk. Women were out there. They were not immediate threats to our intimacy, but they were women with power - the wrong kind of power, the power he had given to them by deflecting his own. They were not good, kind women, for they had forgotten the tender nature of their natural feminine force and had instead replaced it with a harsh and wounded tone. They earned their power by manipulation and control. Many women do this. And many men, trying to be good men, relinquish their power to this type of woman.

Mother, former wife, colleague; they continued to come. Women of influence of the wrong sort. They had established their power over him over time. He did not know how to tell them to go away, because he was a loving man. He did not know how to introduce us - we were so very different. And out the back door I would sneak, while he was performing, while he was meeting someone else’s demands, while he was denying the mighty power of what he felt while inside his house with me.

Time and again, I heard their voices, and my dog and I would leave. Back to the forest. Back to the soft ground and the pine needles. Back to the canopy. To leave felt like a loss, but I was forgiving, trusting the true nature of what we shared, and the forest was a comfortable place to come back to, and so my dissatisfaction was slow to grow.

I was in the woods, and then I would leave, and then I would return again. I would leave for a man, and return to my own home because I did not have his full attention. He did not know how to give it. In time I became a bit lost - for I loved him, but I always returned alone.

And then one day, I remembered. The knock came at the door, he chose to go, and I knew I no longer needed to feel displaced.

Because, you see, I remembered. I do not live in the forest. It is not a place I simply seek refuge. It is not where I build my house - which is why my dog and I never saw my house in the dream. It is not where I retreat or hide.

Being in the depths of the forest is home. It is warm and full, it is life and death, it is plush and providing. It is the mother wrapping us all. It is not fleeting, it remembers all stories, and it does not scorn. It envelops light and dark and integrates them both. It is home. It is me. I never need to leave again.

You see, I am the fucking woods. I am the sacred and wild feminine itself. The feminine and wild nature are one in the same.

…

That was the dream. Then I awoke to truly remember, and over the months that followed, my dream became prophecy. I am the woods. I am inviting, I am warm, I am strong. I have established systems within me, a divine integration of light and dark, of soft and hard, and I provide all the solace in the world. I am the feminine. I am the trees and the dirt and the pine needles. I am the mother, the divine lover, the great host.

There is no bed, there is no house, there is no front door. To imagine that there is anything other than the truth of the divine, that we found in our union, is to look to the false and wounded constructs that society has built for answers that only come when you stop looking elsewhere. You built your house on the foundation of truths you had before you at the time, but in your bed, you found a new kind of woman. A new kind of union. A new kind of permission.

You are welcome to join me, but I will not entertain false guests with you at your front door.

I have done so, on my own, for long enough. I have in my past forgotten the divinity of my nature, as so many women have, and now, I have no choice but to reclaim it. You assumed I’d be content to stay in your arms, in your bed, but you did not know that I was the forest. Indeed, I had also forgotten.

You did not know that I represent what we both need in order to let go of the power of old ways. That is what the divine feminine’s role is at this time on the planet. We hold the space and shape of love divine. Most men will not be able to meet us here and it will require choices of women - great patience or independence, or a combination. We will be patient and inviting, but we will hold a standard. We will be boundaries. We will not be held back, we will not be hidden by men any longer, we will not forget our truths, and as we remember, a power shift will occur. We are no longer looking to men for permission or even reclamation. The reclamation needs to happen within each woman. Men will have to stop addressing the knocking of ill-willed callings. They are used to responding, to knowing, to making decisions, to maintaining power-over. That time is now over. In my dream, in my life, but my experience mirrors the greater unfolding. That time is collectively coming to a close.

Dear Man, I am the forest. What is your force? Where is your divine strength? The forest, too, has a compliment; a counterpart. Be it. And if you do not know it, come to me, and together, we will discover you own wild nature. But this time, you must come to my forest home.